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markfrankel18

The reason every book about Africa has the same cover-and it's not pretty - Quartz - 3 views

qz.com/...-same-cover-and-its-not-pretty

TOK Africa arts orientalism history

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 May 14 - No Cached
  • Last week, Africa Is a Country, a blog that documents and skewers Western misconceptions of Africa, ran a fascinating story about book design. It posted a collage of 36 covers of books that were either set in Africa or written by African writers. The texts of the books were as diverse as the geography they covered: Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique. They were written in wildly divergent styles, by writers that included several Nobel Prize winners. Yet all of books’ covers featured an acacia tree, an orange sunset over the veld, or both. + “In short,” the post said, “the covers of most novels ‘about Africa’ seem to have been designed by someone whose principal idea of the continent comes from The Lion King.”
Lawrence Hrubes

This Is The True Size Of Africa - 0 views

www.filmsforaction.org/...his-is-the-true-size-of-africa

maps geography perception

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 12 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • How large is Africa compared to the United States, or Western Europe? Most inhabitants of the latter places might guess it is a little larger, but few would have any idea of the scale of the difference. This has led German graphics designer Kai Krause to produce this map to shake people's perceptions a little.
  • Any attempt to map a spherical planet onto a flat map will involve distortions of size, shape or both. There is a passionate debate among cartographers about the best way to hang the world on a wall, but most agree that the most common maps we get our sense of the world from are very bad ways to do it. The problem is that these maps exaggerate the size of the countries at high  latitudes, and shrink places near the equator - leading to a perception that Europe is larger than South America, to pick just one example among many.
  • Africa, which spans the equator, fares particularly badly on these sorts of projections: Krause says, "Africa is so mind-numbingly immense, that it exceeds the common assumptions by just about anyone I ever met: it contains the entirety of the USA, all of China, India, as well as Japan and pretty much all of Europe as well - all combined!”  Some have argued that since people associate size with importance this encourages the already strong tendency of the world's wealthiest nations to disregard those who live in the tropics. 
Egor Brailovskiy

Six migrants coming from Africa drown in sea off Sicily | Cyprus Mail - 0 views

cyprus-mail.com/...africa-drown-in-sea-off-sicily

africa sicily migrants paradigm

shared by Egor Brailovskiy on 02 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Thousands of immigrants seek the southern shores of Italy every summer, when Mediterranean waters in the Strait of Sicily calm sufficiently for small boats to make the crossing, usually from Libya or Tunisia.
  • Egor Brailovskiy on 02 Oct 13
     
    Migrants from Africa keep risking their life in order to achieve their objective, to reach European Union and to live in the dream, where there is healthcare, education, job opportunity and etc.  Each summer they try to reach Sicily, launching from Tunisia on little boats risking their life. What makes them keep doing it, though they continuously fail. 
Lawrence Hrubes

Letter from Nairobi: The Death of Kofi Awoonor : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...he-murder-of-kofi-awoonor.html

TOK arts poetry Africa Nairobi terrorism attack

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 28 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 28 Sep 13
     
    "On Saturday, September 21st, the Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor was shot dead at Nairobi's Westgate mall by terrorists."
sleggettisp

Can a Nation's Soil Explain Its Economic Fortunes? - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...379733

history economics

shared by sleggettisp on 20 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • sleggettisp on 20 Sep 14
     
    Jared Diamond argued, in his 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel , that geography is fate. One thread of his theory sought to explain why societies in Eurasia developed more quickly than in the Americas and Africa.
Lawrence Hrubes

Migration and Morality - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...migration-and-morality.html

ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Eduardo Porter makes a persuasive economic argument for Europe to be more welcoming to immigrants fleeing Africa and the Middle East instead of erecting barriers and fences to those escaping. But there is also the moral argument.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Culture - How the English language became such a mess - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...150605-your-language-is-sinful

language history

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • First, the greed: invasion and theft. The Romans invaded Britain in the 1st Century AD and brought their alphabet; in the 7th Century, the Angles and Saxons took over, along with their language. Starting in the 9th Century, Vikings occupied parts of England and brought some words (including they, displacing the Old English hie). Then the Norman French conquered in 1066 – and replaced much of the vocabulary with French, including words which over time became beef, pork, invade, tongue and person.
  • Once the English tossed out the French (but not their words) a few centuries later, they started to acquire territories around the world – America, Australia, Africa, India. With each new colony, Britain acquired words: hickory, budgerigar, zebra, bungalow. The British also did business with everyone else and took words as they went – something we call “borrowing,” even though the words were kept. Our language is a museum of conquests.
  • Sometimes sounds just change capriciously. The most significant instance of this in English was the Great Vowel Shift. From the 1400s to about 1700, for reasons that remain unclear, our long vowels all shifted in our mouths like cream swirling slowly in a cup of tea. Before it, see rhymed with "eh"; boot was said like “boat”; and out sounded like “oot.” But when the sounds shifted, the spelling stayed behind.
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  • One more layer of snobbery has added further complications across the Atlantic over the last couple of centuries: national pride. The (relatively few) American simplifications of spelling – color for colour, center for centre – largely owe their existence to Noah Webster’s desire to create a distinctive American English. Canadian preference for keeping many British spellings, on the other hand, has the same nationalistic origins… just in reverse.And now? Now we don’t even want to spell things as they sound. How do spellings like hed, hart, lafter, dotter, and det look to you? Uneducated, perhaps? Annoyingly simplistic? Exactly. We enjoy our discomforts – and we really enjoy arbitrary practices that allow us to tell who are and aren’t the “right sort”. We’ve taken a useful tool and turned it into a social filter.
Aidar Ulan

How the Color Red Influences Our Behavior - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...or-red-influences-our-behavior

TOK science perception emotion behvior

shared by Aidar Ulan on 02 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • red regularly sways behavior.
  • Red is a powerful color
  • It means luck in China, where bridal wear is red, mourning in parts of Africa and sex in Amsterdam's red-light district.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Charged with social and cultural meanings
  • Whereas humans are trichromats—meaning that we have three types of retinal cones sensitive to long (red), medium (green) and short (blue) wavelengths—cattle are dichromats: they possess only two kinds of cones.
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